A Modified Similarity Metric for Unit Testing of Object-Oriented Software Based on Adaptive Random Testing

Abstract

Finding an effective method for testing object-oriented software (OOS) has proven elusive in the software community due to the rapid development of object-oriented programming (OOP) technology. Although significant progress has been made by previous studies, challenges still exist in relation to the object distance measurement of OOS using Adaptive Random Testing (ART). This is partly due to the unique features of OOS such as encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. In a previous work, we proposed a new similarity metric called the Object and Method Invocation Sequence Similarity (OMISS) metric to facilitate multi-class level testing using ART. In this paper, we broaden the set of models in the metric (OMISS) by considering the method parameter and adding the weight in the metric to develop a new distance metric to improve unit testing of OOS. We used the new distance metric to calculate the distance between the set of objects and the distance between the method sequences of the test cases. Additionally, we integrate the new metric in unit testing with ART and applied it to six open source subject programs. The experimental result shows that the proposed method with method parameter considered in this study is better than previous methods without the method parameter in the case of the single method. Our finding further shows that the proposed unit testing approach is a promising direction for assisting software engineers who seek to improve the failure-detection effectiveness of OOS testing.